Cloud Computing: The Benefits of Federation

- David Slik, Technical Director of Object Storage with NetApp (www.netapp.com), says:

Today's clouds eliminate silos, but provide relatively undifferentiated services. By federating clouds together, different clouds can provide specialized functionality, such as clouds specialized for retention compliance, content distribution, data preservation and high-performance access and transformation. When comparing uses of clouds, there are different balances of compute, storage and I/O required. Some clouds will specialize in managing vast repositories, with a low MB/s to PB ratio, where others will manage data that is intensely mined and transformed (such as Apache Hadoop), and require a high GB/s to TB ratio. These different types of storage clouds, which become silos themselves, will be unified through federation.